wrapped up last week, sharing while it's fresh.
recruiter screen was about 20 min, pretty conversational. she asked why Replit specifically and I think that question matters more than it sounds. they're a small team and they want people who've thought about the product.
take-home was a 72-hour window, build a small feature or tool (in Replit, obviously). I spent maybe 8 hours total over two days. the brief was open-ended enough that your choices reveal a lot about your instincts. I asked one clarifying question, which felt fine.
then two technical rounds. first was a live coding session in a Repl. not leetcode-style. they gave me a half-broken piece of code and asked me to debug and extend it. they specifically said I could Google. the signal is whether you can navigate real docs and reason about what you're seeing, not whether you've memorized API signatures.
second round was product + system design. "how would you make collaborative editing more responsive at scale" kind of territory. it got into tradeoffs fast. I don't think there's a right answer, they want to see how you think through it.
behavioral stuff came up organically throughout, not in a dedicated block. "tell me about a time you shipped something fast and it broke" came up in the middle of the coding round.
still waiting on the decision but the process felt pretty good. very little theater.